May 02, 2013

"Bird Language"

As the old man sang, each new verse detailed another page of the
cowboy’s improbable voyage along the Chisholm Trail from Texas to
Kansas, which was a sequence of increasingly unlikely and anatomically doubtful accounts of said cowboy’s
congress with a host of shady characters including a horse, a
rattlesnake in a pile of sticks, and an old woman who gave him nothin’
but hell. And a social disease. If my memory serves me correctly, it
concluded with several verses about his ending up in what would now be
termed a “long-term relationship” with a cow, and what the cow did when
she caught him “puttin’ on airs” with a buffalo who “was no better than
she should be”, but by then we were laughing too hard for me to remember
much of anything.